Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074)

by Lain, Douglas

  When she was little she’d been a sleepwalker. When she was five she’d had her recurring dream about radio stars. Edith Piaf, Léo Ferré, and Maurice Chevalier came to visit her. She dreamed they were waiting outside the heavy green doors of her apartment building in Le Marais, waiting for her to bring down her orange Peugeot tricycle so she could ride with them down the narrow streets to the place where songs were. Natalie woke up many times to find herself dragging her tricycle. The clatter from bumping it down the spiral steps would usually wake her up before she reached the ground floor, or if the noise didn’t wake her it woke her parents.

  Natalie had been a sleepwalker, but she’d only made it out those front doors and onto the cobblestones once. Her parents found her sitting on her tricycle. Her feet were on the pedals but she wasn’t pedaling. Instead they found her singing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” softly under her breath while men and women in fine clothes tried to ignore her. They stepped around the little girl whose presence didn’t make sense. After that Natalie’s parents put a chain lock on the front door. They made sure it was placed high on the door, above her reach.

  Natalie looked down the stairs at the pillars and lattice of steel bars and tried to remember what it had been like to remember her dreaming.

  She’d been maybe four years old when she dreamed that her father confessed to being a wind-up toy. She couldn’t have been more than four. He was just like the painted cowboy toy on her dresser. He told her that he’d been built in Japan and he made a whirring sound, a series of mechanical clicks, and then he told her that she was sleeping. He told her that she was dreaming.

  Now, climbing the Eiffel Tower at the behest of Christopher Robin, Natalie turned again to look out at Paris and again the horizon was blank.

  She opened Sagan’s book and read the last few lines:

  When I am in bed, at dawn, listening to the cars passing below in the streets of Paris, my memory betrays me.… Something rises in me that I call by name, with closed eyes. Bonjour, tristesse!

  All she had with her now were memories of tin fathers, trips to amusement parks where she would ride carousels and look at her own reflection in the mirrored glass at the centre of the wheel, and pop songs from ORTF. She could remember a hundred different fantasies, but nothing that was real.

  Natalie reached the top of the tower and there was still nothing. She stood at the rail and looked out into darkness.

  * * *

  The students from Nanterre and the Sorbonne brought down small round tables from Café Brébant on the second floor. They brought down carafes of wine, tea pots, pastries, and cakes. Christopher Robin sat down and William stood next to the table. Christopher Robin poured himself a cup of tea, and William snapped his jaws and gulped down the Napoleon pastry when Christopher Robin tossed it to him.

  Guy Debord, Isadora Baris, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit sat with them at the table. Isadora poured out red wine, and Guy leaned back and looked around at the blank disc around the tower. Cohn-Bendit bit into a pastry.

  Meanwhile, the students kept on looting the tower. They emptied the restaurant on the top floor; they brought out finery and set it down in the clay mud. The students and workers sat around tables with pristine white tablecloths and drank champagne from bottles and used their fingers to eat from tins of caviar and jam.

  “A long, long time ago, in the beginning, there were no people, no trees, no plants,” Isadora said to Guy as she offered up her wineglass for a toast. “There was nothing.”

  Christopher Robin put down his cup of tea and reached over to pet William, but unclipped the leash from the bear’s collar instead. William moved out from under the tower and across the clay. William made a path in the soft earth as he ran. Christopher Robin couldn’t tell how far away William was because there was nothing else there to give him a sense of perspective. Eventually William stopped and scratched his hindquarters with his mouth. The bear bent and licked between his legs, and then scuttled on.

  When Christopher Robin’s father wrote his autobiography in 1938 he entitled the book It’s Too Late Now. The book was sold to the publishers as a literary autobiography. The famous author of the Pooh stories had promised the publishers that he’d tell the story of how he became an author, but the book was nothing like that at all. Instead of writing about all the famous people who had helped him along the way, instead of regaling readers with stories of excess and debauch in the halls of Punch, his father had mostly turned his effort toward remembering what it had been like to be young.

  At the North Pole the moon was painted onto the sky. There was no light coming from the stars or moon, but there was light. Chris could see white electric light at the edges of the sky.

  Why had his father written the Pooh stories? Why had the esteemed A. A. Milne created a fictional Christopher Robin in the place of his real son? It had been a way to escape from being fifty, a way to return to the source of his life.

  Maybe there was a spotlight behind the façade at the horizon? Maybe there was something real? It couldn’t all be dreamtime, could it? It couldn’t be flat clay forever in all directions.

  The rule Christopher’s father never spoke aloud but always insisted upon was this: Never grow up. Enjoy the trivial aspects of life, remain innocent, stay where you are. It was a rule that was impossible to obey, a rule that could never be spoken of directly, but it persisted.

  There were two poles: childhood and adulthood. There was innocence and there was corruption. All through his life Christopher Robin had rebelled against his father by siding with corrupted adulthood, by refusing innocence and joy, but this was just playing the same game in reverse.

  His own father knew that the child was innocent only in so much as he or she was visibly corrupt. His father argued that adulthood could be more joyful than childhood precisely through the abandonment of this sort of corrupted innocence. So how was it that Christopher continued to turn away from his fictional counterpart? Wasn’t his effort to be real, authentic, mature just exactly his attempt to remain a child?

  “We’ve run out of wine,” Guy said. He tipped his glass over and the tiny bit of red wine that was left in his glass dribbled onto the white tablecloth.

  There was nothing in Paris and Christopher Robin realized it. There was nothing here for him, and he resolved to bring this nothing back with him when he returned to his adulthood in Dartmouth.

  * * *

  What surprised Gerrard was that he wasn’t surprised. From the beginning Gerrard had known what was coming. He’d set up the dreamtime, helped Christopher Robin find the North Pole, and now he had to ask himself if that was all there was to it. Gerrard had derailed Christopher Robin, Paris, and from the looks of it the rest of the world, but he’d only arrived at the place from which he’d set out from the start.

  Guy Debord rose and sat down and said, “Thank you,” which was the proper thing to say, and then Debord shut his eyes again, but every now and then he shook his head and said, “I’m not getting it right.”

  “Christopher Robin,” Gerrard said. “I believe we needed to dig.”

  Christopher Robin was still looking out at the empty world with his chin in his hands. He responded with a shrug, and then wondered if this counted as nothing, which was his favorite thing to do, or if this thing he was doing was a kind of something. Christopher said that while it was indeed very little, almost nothing, on the other hand it was something. In fact, Christopher thought that whenever one set out for nothing one was likely to end up with something instead, but that something might be a little more pleasant, a little more like nothing than most of the nothings one had encountered before.

  Gerrard knocked the table over. He first slowly pulled the tablecloth, and was satisfied when the red wine spilled and ran across the linen surface and left a dark stain there. And when the table toppled over and the wineglasses and pastries landed in the mud, that was even better. Gerrard broke a wooden leg off the table and with it scratched out a line in the mud.

  In
the Pooh story when Christopher Robin found the North Pole, when he sat at a table with Pooh and celebrated finding it, what had happened next was that the story had ended. Christopher Robin had told Pooh that he was going to be growing up, that he couldn’t do nothing anymore, and that instead he (Christopher Robin) would be doing some sort of something which meant that Pooh would have to do something about the nothing without Christopher.

  Gerrard’s father had read him this part about something and how it turns into nothing, about how Christopher Robin would grow up to be an old man and forget about the nothing, and how even the bear would grow old, he’d be ninety-nine before he turned hundred. Gerrard’s father had read this to him when he was a very little boy, and then Gerrard’s father had become nothing himself. He’d turned himself into nothing, and that was why Gerrard had to dig. In order to get to what wouldn’t turn into nothing he had to dig through the story he was in, get past or below Christopher Robin, the Eiffel Tower, and the strikes of May 1968, to the real thing underneath.

  And so Gerrard dug a hole.

  He

  dug

  and he

  dug

  and he

  dug

  and as he

  dug

  he sang “The Internationale.”

  So comrades, come rally,

  And the last fight let us face.

  The Internationale,

  Unites the human race.

  Then he dug a little further … and a little further … and then just a little further, and before too long Gerrard heard a

  CRACK!

  Oh, help? he thought. And then Gerrard fell through the hole he had made.

  PART THREE

  JUNE 1968

  In which Daniel finds Gerrard in a traffic jam, Natalie stops reading Bonjour Tristesse, Gerrard tries to wake up, and Christopher Robin invents a new game

  28

  Chris looked for Gerrard at the Jardin des Plantes with Abby and Daniel on May 28. The shadow from the skylight at the Paris Zoo broke the cement floor of the main hall into uniform boxes, and crossing the space between the cages meant crossing hundreds of intersecting lines and compartments.

  Neither Gerrard nor the zookeeper was anywhere to be seen, but Louis the orangutan was waiting for them. The placard outside the cage informed zoo visitors that Louis was twenty-seven years old. The orangutan climbed down the wide trunk of a sawed-off tree trunk they’d mounted in his cage. Louis found his large corrugated cardboard box that was half-buried in sawdust, walked to the far left corner, and placed the box over his head.

  “Hello, Bear,” Daniel said.

  Christopher tried to smile, but he felt more unsettled than amused. When the orangutan disappeared into the box, all they could see were the animal’s prehensile toes. Christopher stepped forward, past the chain, and knocked against the bars of the cage with his knuckle. He called out to the animal, tried to get the ape to come out from hiding, but got no response.

  Abby clung to her purse in the monkey house. Her usually perfectly styled auburn hair hung loose around her face and her mouth was a straight line. She was observing everything but not responding much to what she saw.

  “I feel as though there is a gap,” Abby said as she directed Daniel to look up at the baby orangutan climbing a rope near the chain link around the skylight. The younger orangutan seemed happier than the older one who’d hidden himself away in a cardboard rectangle. “I can ask myself questions that are impossible to answer, like how did I get here from where I was last. How much can I really remember about the process of getting here to the zoo? It seems like there are just moments and I find myself in them from time to time, but most of what goes on happens in darkness.”

  “Maybe seeing the gap, recognizing how much goes on in darkness, is enough?” Christopher asked. “Can you live with that?”

  Abby took him by the hand but didn’t answer. They looked for Gerrard outside. The day they’d come to the zoo with Gerrard had been a popular day, but this time they didn’t see anyone else there at all. There was nobody to ask for directions, and so they set off in a rather indecisive way, and then stopped and turned around.

  At the lizard house the walls were painted green and the heat lamps let off a green light. There were lizards and crocodiles and tarantulas and so on, and Christopher looked down at a salamander in a metal dish of water, looked at the brown pebbles. The animal stuck his tongue out and then climbed out of his dish of water. Christopher knocked on the glass and the salamander scurried away to hide in the sand.

  Daniel liked the hippo standing behind an iron gate in an outdoor pen. When they looked through the gate at the grey beast it opened its mouth to show them its pink maw. At the pen for the giraffes Abby watched the animals chew and swallow leaves. And all the penguins looked the same to her.

  * * *

  They did not find Gerrard, but the zookeeper was with the elephants. He had one of the elephants’ feet on his lap and was using a meter-long file to remove dead skin and caked-on dirt. Christopher waved to the rotund young man and then waited for the zookeeper to finish what he was doing and approach the bars of the cage.

  “Have you seen the boy I was here with the other day?” Christopher asked.

  “Can’t say that I have,” the zookeeper said.

  “Oh, I should probably apologize,” Christopher said.

  “For what, sir?”

  “Not only did I lose my friend but I also lost your bear. I took him on a long walk, and he got away from me. He got away from me at the Eiffel Tower.”

  The zookeeper tapped the elephant file against the bars and chewed on his bottom lip. He kicked at an empty red-and-white-striped box that some unconscionable patron had left just inside the cage, tried to send the cardboard box through the gap between the bars, but missed. Then the zookeeper looked up at Christopher and smiled.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I know where William is.” He led Christopher to the bear’s cage, next to the gazelle and the ostrich, and there was no doubt about it. There was William behind the bars.

  “Where did you find him?” Christopher asked.

  “Monsieur, I found him this morning in the same exact place you see him now. He was right here in his cage when I came in this morning. I guess he got lonely for it.” The zookeeper walked toward the cage and held out an apple for William, coaxed him over to the bars, and then dropped the fruit into the animal’s mouth. William stood up on his hind legs, stuck his front paws through the bars, rested them on a horizontal bar, and opened his mouth for more.

  “May we?” Christopher said. The zookeeper gave Daniel the next apple, and the boy stepped forward to William and gave it to him. The bear crunched it twice with his teeth and then swallowed it down. Abby petted the bear’s head, rubbed behind an ear, and then finally smiled.

  “That’s some bear,” Christopher said.

  The zookeeper agreed.

  * * *

  On May 30 Natalie was looking for Gerrard in the Latin Quarter when she got to the Champs-Élysées and found the end of the occupations, the end of May, instead. The other half of France (the socialites, business owners, bureaucrats, and right wing students from the Sorbonne) were marching against her, row by row.

  The Gaullists were in the streets, and there were thousands and thousands of beautiful people all around her. It was a procession of the moneyed and the comfortable, and nobody was breaking a sweat. The revolution of the leisure classes smelled good.

  A pretty young student with black hair, wearing a day dress patterned after a Mondrian painting, blue and white squares divided by perfect black lines, marched with a hundred others behind the banner of the French flag. She held up the front page of the newspaper France Soir and chanted the headline: “De Gaulle says, ‘I remain! I keep Pompidou.’”

  Even as she reached Arc de Triomphe she found row after row of affluent anger and well-coifed reaction but she continued on, walking against the march, hoping somehow to stop it. She wal
ked against the flow of strolling protesters still hoping she might find Gerrard there or that she might find something, at least. France seemed no longer to be dreaming, to be waking up or going back to sleep, but Natalie was seeking some way to be lucid. She stopped walking, stood still under the sea of tricolor flags. Men in Yves St. Laurent sunglasses and clean wool coats shouted that they wanted to liberate the factories from the communists and give the people back the freedom of work. An older woman wearing the same red silk dress in which Donald had dressed Natalie on the night of the barricades put her hand to her neck and grasped her pearls in a protective gesture as she passed Natalie.

  Natalie stopped and turned in a slow rotation, scanning the scene that circled round the Place de l’Étoile. The revolution had already been turned around. The students and workers wanted to liberate politics by following their desires. They wanted to take power, but instead their desires had been liberated from politics, and established power had taken the form of their protest away from them as well.

  * * *

  On June 4 Christopher led his family through the traffic jam and looked for an entrance to the Metro, a way back to England. He didn’t want to see Paris put itself back together, but he couldn’t cut between the automobiles and through the exhaust fast enough. Daniel dawdled behind them, the duffle bag the boy was carrying continually slipping from his shoulder.

  Paris was overrun with Minis, compacts, four-door sedans, and station wagons. The cars were brightly colored, and reflected green, red, and yellow up and down Rue du Four, down Boulevard Saint-Germain, all along the Seine.

  The workers had had their Ascension, but now it was Pentecost. Reality descended and the unions made the decision to allow the petrol to return to the gas stations or, putting it another way, to push workers in the petrol industry back to work so that the French could drive on their long weekend.

  “Artificially flavored and new,” Daniel said. He dragged William’s leash behind him as he drifted back and forth on the sidewalk. Daniel missed the bear.